“We could be able to afford a child,” she said. “And I’ve seen how good you are around kids.”
“I like kids and babies. I really do,” Simon said. “But I’m just not equipped for them. What if something big happens in LA? What kind of father would I be, always on the road? How many babies did you see when you came on tour with me?”
“A few,” she said. “A lot.”
“You know that’s not true. And you know that kids become teenagers who hate you.”
“Our kid will never hate us,” she said, prickling with anger. She tried not to imagine a teenager, storming out the door, face shuttered. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
“Why the fuck do we have to argue about this again?” He threw up his hands. “I don’t want this! You do!” He gave her that look again, like he was unpeeling her, causing her to lift her hands to her face to make sure she was still all there, all in one piece. She grabbed for a tissue and sneezed into it, and her eyes began to well.
“You could want it.” Her voice rose to a shout. A sting settled in her throat and her sinuses hurt. She had had colds like this before, and she knew how they liked to travel to her lungs, breeding into full-blown bronchitis, despite all the vitamin C and zinc and cold meds she’d take. If she couldn’t nip it now, she’d be in bed for days, miserable and sick, something she couldn’t afford. If she dared to get on a plane like this, her sinuses would probably blow right out. She had to get better. She just had to. She drank a bit more wine, hoping it would make her sleepy enough to doze it off.
Simon covered his face with his hands, as if that might make him invisible.
“Why can’t we ever really talk about us?” she said, persistent in pushing him. “Everyone around us has homes they own, a family—”
“You know that’s not true. And we’re not everyone.” He folded one black sock over the other, so it looked like a tongue, and then he hurled them to the floor. “Anyway, we are so talking about us.”
“No. Not really. I’m talking and you’re deflecting me.” She sneezed again and hunted for more tissues. He sighed and looked around the apartment. He drained his wineglass and filled it again.
“You’re making me really, really sort of pissed off,” she said.
His mouth tightened.
“Spit it out,” she said. “Go ahead. Say whatever it is. You know you want to.”
He shook his head. “No, not now. You’re too upset for this conversation,” he said. “Too snuffly.”
“I hate it when you tell me how I feel,” Stella said. “You never used to do that. You used to listen. You used to really hear me.” Her sinuses were so clogged that her eyes hurt. This argument felt different, angrier than usual. They were both fed up. She was tired of feeling so raw, like her body was filled with shards of glass. Her whole face ached.
“Do you think if we keep having this conversation the answer will eventually come up different?” Simon said.
Stella wished that she could just get up and dramatically storm out, stay away for a few hours, and then come back to find everything changed, including him.
“Why do we always have to do what you want,” she said. Her anger swelled. She braced a hand along the wall.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, hey, hey.”
She heard the alarm in his voice and she made a decision. “I changed my mind. I’m not going with you to LA,” she said. “I’m sick. I feel crappy. I just want to stay in bed.” As soon as she said it, she felt a flare of surprise, because she didn’t realize until now that it really was what she wanted, that it seemed like the answer. He could go to LA and miss her, and she could be here and miss him, and then, when he got back, they could reboot.
“You’re telling me this now?”
“I guess I am.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Well, we’re not leaving at least until tomorrow night. You can baby yourself until then, get better—”
“You don’t understand. I’m not telling you not to go—I would never do that. But I can’t go with you this time. I can’t do it.”
“I don’t understand you.” He touched her face. “This gig is something new, something special. And you used to love touring.”
He was right. It was a long time ago, but she did at first. The excitement of new cities. All those new people to meet. Being so crazy in love that nothing else mattered. She could watch Simon shine onstage, and when he sang, she felt he was singing just to her. But then, more and more on those trips, she had huge patches of time that she had to try to fill herself. She began to get tired of it, to want something other than all those towns going by in a blur. Chicago. Santa Fe. Sedona. The coffee shops where she picked at pie and drank herself jumpy with coffee while she waited for him to finish rehearsal. She tried to find hourly work as a nurse, but there weren’t always jobs.
“Traveling together’s romantic,” he said.
“Right, romantic. Guys and instruments, and hotels with a tiny bathroom that always smells funky. I don’t want to be treated like I’m part of the entourage. I never fit in.”
“Who says you have to fit in? You had fun on tour. I know you did.”
But the last tour she had gone on hadn’t been fun at all. The music had suddenly gotten too loud for her and she started using earplugs. She knew all that screaming noise was messing up her hearing, but she wondered also if maybe the loud music was hurting her. If it was, then she had to protect what she had. “People are going to think you’re my mother, with those earplugs,” Simon said at one point.
He was teasing her, but she still felt hurt. She had looked over at him and noticed a few girls nudging their way closer, laughing at her, mimicking the way she twisted her hair out of her face so she could get the earplugs in. And then the plugs hadn’t even helped; her ears had rung for days afterward. And shortly after that, right before her twenty-sixth birthday, she told him she wasn’t touring with him anymore.
“You’re not worried about him on his own for so long? You won’t miss him?” her friends asked. But Stella knew how much Simon loved her, at least at first. The early days, when they were in their twenties, when she toured with him and he had some fame, there had been plenty of girls hanging around. She had gotten used to seeing the other members of the band partying it up in hotel rooms, the door wide open, the whiskey flowing, the girls so young that they looked illegal. Rob had guys and girls both. Even Kevin, who loved his girlfriend, would wait for her to crash into sleep and then he’d saunter into the party room just like the cock of the walk, eyeing every woman like they were appetizers on an endless menu. Simon refused to participate. He spent what little free time he had with Stella, walking around whatever city they were in, later hanging out in their room, away from the rest of the band. She never had a reason not to trust him. Their whole time together, there had never been a suspicious hang-up on the phone, a note stuffed into their mailbox, a stain of lipstick. And when she had stopped touring with him, Simon had called her every night, sometimes talking for hours. Occasionally she could hear the band members shouting and laughing in the background, but they were with their wives or their girlfriends or, like Simon, on their own. She told herself it was by choice.